Quotes from Jordan B. Peterson

When you decide to learn about your faults so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that's the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that's the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.

The philosophical study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such study can render us more sophisticated in our choices. Even older and deeper than ethics, however, is religion. Religion concerns itself not with (mere) right and wrong but with good and evil themselves—with the archetypes of right and wrong.

Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.

each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one's own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.

Pride falls in love with its own creations, and tries to make them absolute.

It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality

The Great Mother impels—pushes (with certainty of mortality) and pulls (with possibility of redemption)—development of consciousness and of self-consciousness.

It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter.

The cross is the burden of life. It is a place of betrayal, torture, and death. It is therefore a fundamental symbol of mortal vulnerability. In the Christian drama, it is also the place where vulnerability is transcended, as a consequence of its acceptance. [...] By accepting life's suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.

Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life. How could it be otherwise?

Alternatively, perfection might be regarded as the absence of all unnecessary things, and the pleasures of an ascetic life.

You have to be willing to be a fool to advance.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.

There's some real utility in gratitude. It's also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment

With careful searching, with careful attention, you might tip the balance toward opportunity and against obstacle sufficiently so that life is clearly worth living, despite its fragility and suffering.

You're not everything you could be, and you know it.

el orden que aspiramos a imponer en el mundo se puede solidificar a raíz de nuestros cándidos empeños por dejar de sopesar todo lo desconocido. Cuando estos empeños llegan demasiado lejos, acecha el totalitarismo, impulsado por el deseo de ejercer un control completo cuando no es posible ni siquiera a nivel teórico.

The modern mind, which regards itself as having transcended the domain of the magical, is nonetheless still endlessly capable of "irrational" (read motivated) reactions. We fall under the spell of experience whenever we attribute our frustration, aggression, devotion or lust to the person or situation that exists as the proximal "cause" of such agitation. We are not yet "objective," even in our most clear-headed moments (and thank God for that).

This is what happened. This is why. This is what I have to do to avoid such things from now on": That's a successful memory. That's the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is "accurately recorded," to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.

The most intense hatreds and also sometimes the most intense love is within families.

I think often people come to the conclusion that life is meaningless because that's a better conclusion to come to than the reverse; because if life is meaningless, well then, who cares what you do? But if life is meaningful - if what you do matters... then everything you do matters. And that puts a terrible responsibility on the individual. And I think that people are generally unwilling to bear that.

There is a terrible reptilian predator, metaphorically speaking, pursuing you all the time, just like the crocodile with the ticktock of time emanating from the clock he swallowed chasing the tyrannical coward Captain Hook.

Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel's back.

The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group — there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that.